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Installing SQLDeveloper 4 on Mint and Ubuntu – Minus the Alien

Deb recently bought a new kettle.
Now, a kettle used to simply boil water and turn itself off when it was done.
Not this thing.
It lights up as it boils and announces the fact that it’s finished with a melodious ping.
It’s got gauges and lights and switches.
I’ve decided that it’s probably a Dalek in disguise.
Like Daleks (or at least, the original Daleks), it can’t go up stairs – or if it can, it’s not advertising the fact.
Every morning, descending to the kitchen is filled with trepidation.
When will the Dalek tire of vaporizing innocent water molecules and move on to World Domination…

Doc-tor ! Doc-tor ! I feel like a ket-tle !

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find that, like most whizzy modern appliances, it runs on Java.
Which brings us, by a fairly circuitous route, to the topic at hand – SQLDeveloper.

Oracle’s latest incarnation of it’s IDE does indeed run on Java – the version 7 JDK to be precise.
In this post, I’ll go through the steps required on Mint to :

Install the Java 7 JDK

Install SQLDeveloper 4

Persuade SQLDeveloper 4 to play nicely with Java

Add SQLDeveloper to the Cinnamon Menu

The good news is that we can do all of this without the messy alien conversion of an rpm package to .deb format.

NOTE – I’ve followed these steps on Mint13, but they should be pretty much the same for any Debian Distro.
Anyway, without further ado…

Install Java 7

What’s installed now

Before getting into the installation, it’s probably a good idea to establish what Java version you have at present.
To do this, open a Terminal Window and :

Getting the latest and greatest Java version

You are about to add the following PPA to your system:
Oracle Java (JDK) Installer (automatically downloads and installs Oracle JDK6 / JDK7 / JDK8). There are no actual Java files in this PPA. More info: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/install-oracle-java-jdk-7-in-ubuntu-via.html
Debian installation instructions: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/06/how-to-install-oracle-java-7-in-debian.html
More info: https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/java
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it

I’m not sure if the following step is necessary, but I ran it to be on the safe side. Ensure that your packages are up-to-date by running :

sudo apt-get update

Now for the installation itself…

Installing Java 7

Start by getting the installer :

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

The output looks like this :

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
gsfonts-x11
Suggested packages:
visualvm ttf-baekmuk ttf-unfonts ttf-unfonts-core ttf-kochi-gothic
ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-arphic-uming
The following NEW packages will be installed
gsfonts-x11 oracle-java7-installer
0 to upgrade, 2 to newly install, 0 to remove and 31 not to upgrade.
Need to get 26.7 kB of archives.
After this operation, 228 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Yes, we do want to continue so enter ‘Y’.
At this point you’ll be presented with the following screen :

Takes me back to the early 90’s…

Hit ENTER and …

Yes, I do want to install DOOM…er…Java

Use the left arrow key to navigate to Yes and hit ENTER.

You will then get feedback to the effect that it’s downloading stuff. This should end with something like :

There are a couple of things to note here.
First, the package you need to download is labelled Other Platforms.
Secondly, if you do happen to look at the Release instructions for this package, it will mention JDK 1.6.0_11 or above.
These instructions are out of date in this regard and refer to the previous version of SQLDeveloper.

Anyway, on the download page, click accept License Agreement and click on the Other Platforms Download.

Oracle SQL Developer
Copyright (c) 1997, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Type the full pathname of a JDK installation (or Ctrl-C to quit), the path will be stored in /home/mike/.sqldeveloper/4.0.0/product.conf

At this point, we enter the path, minus the bin directory (which SQLDeveloper will look in automatically) :

/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle

If you have a previous version of SQLDeveloper installed, you will be asked if you want to copy all the settings, connections etc to the latest version :

Finally, SQLDeveloper will start.

Adding SQLDeveloper4 to the Cinnamon Menu

To add SQLDeveloper to the menu…

Right-click the Menu in the bottom left corner of the screen and select Configure :

Near the end when I type sudo chmod+x sqldeveloper.sh I get the error: sudo: chmod+x: command not found. I double checked and I am located in cd /opt/sqldeveloper401/sqldeveloper like the previous line says.

Thank you very much, it all works now. Can you please point me to another link where I can set up a new connection. Im not sure what the username and pass should be. I never really used this out of classes where they gave us all this info in advance.

the network adapter could not establish the connection
Am I missing something here? I followed your post line by line. I dont know what the username and pasword is (i tried my linux root) but I keep getting that error when I test. I tried orcl and xe for sid.

I assume that you are trying to connect to an Oracle XE database that is installed on the same machine that you’ve just installed SQLDeveloper. Is this correct ?

If so, then there are two users that will definitely exist : SYS and SYSTEM.

You will have been asked to setup passwords for these users when you installed XE.
In these circumstances, you should be able to connect as SYSTEM with the password that you setup when installing XE.
The database name will be XE.
Using the Basic connection setting in SQLDeveloper the settings you need for this connection should be as follows (assuming you used the default port when setting up XE (i.e. 1521):
Connection Name : system_on_xe
Username : system
Password : [whatever password you set for system when installing xe]

You deserve a big thanks for the complete explanation of:
Type the full pathname of a JDK installation (or Ctrl-C to quit), the path will be stored in /home/bogdan/.sqldeveloper/4.0.0/product.conf
/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64

seeing as SQLDeveloper itself is installed via the zip ( in this method at least), rather than via a package manager, then you should be able to uninstall simply by deleting the files in the appropriate directory.
I should say I haven’t tried this myself, but I don’t think there’s much more to it than that.

This is avery good manual. All doubts are anticipated and all instructions work exactly as stated. If the version of java and the version of Sql Developer is different from those in the instructions, then it is very easy to infer the substitutions. I can tell you that these instructions still hold for the jvm v8 and sqldeveloper version 413 as of today’s date.